Breen on "Catholic Legal Theory in Catholic Law Schools: Past and Present"

John Breen (along with Lee Strang) has been doing a lot of interesting and important work on the history of Catholic legal education in the United States.  Now, in his talk, he is presenting some of that work to the group, helping explain how Catholic Legal Theory has, in fact, been instantiated in the structures, practices, and curricula of actual Catholic law schools, past and present.  

He emphasizes, among other things, that -- generally speaking -- Catholic law schools in America were not explicitly founded in order to be vehicles or homes for Catholic Legal Theory, but instead to be means of advancement for Catholic immigrants and to enhance the "prestige" of the various then-new Catholic universities.  But, over time, calls came -- at least at some schools -- for a more distinctively Catholic legal education, and these calls tended to emphasize St. Thomas Aquinas and jurisprudence.  For a few decades, many Catholic law schools were requiring Thomistic jurisprudence courses.  But, by the early 1960s, for various reasons, the Neo-Thomistic "proposal" had "failed" and, at most places, there was a "loss of a distinctively Catholic jurisprudence in the curriculum."   (I had not appreciated the fact that, between 1965 and 1975, the number of law students doubled or thought much about the connection between this development, on the one hand, and the distinctively Catholic character, mission, or curriculum of Catholic law schools, on the other.)  John closes with thoughts inspired by and drawn from Philip Gleason's Contending With Modernity and with questions about what it is (if anything) that could replace Neo-Thomism as the organizing "intellectual architecture" for distinctively Catholic law schools.  Could "Catholic Social Thought" do the job?  John is skeptical.